RE: Supporting arrays of concepts : node labels

Ron,
Yes, I see your point. The client computer has no way of knowing when
the sequence does or does not matter; therefore it would have to
reproduce it faithfully in all cases; and  conversion to another
language would complicate the whole thing. Tempting to think that you
might respect the order (only) when node labels are present, but this
does not work either. The pursuit of perfection is a complicated
undertaking!
Stella

*****************************************************
Stella Dextre Clarke
Information Consultant
Luke House, West Hendred, Wantage, Oxon, OX12 8RR, UK
Tel: 01235-833-298
Fax: 01235-863-298
SDClarke@LukeHouse.demon.co.uk
*****************************************************



-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Davies [mailto:ron@rondavies.be] 
Sent: 10 May 2004 10:02
To: Stella Dextre Clarke; public-esw-thes@w3.org
Subject: RE: Supporting arrays of concepts : node labels


Stella,

You've hit on exactly the issue that concerns me, which is how the
network client knows what to do with what it gets back from the server.
The ultimate aim, or user case if you prefer, is supporting a
human-browsable display, both for alphabetical and for hierarchical
types of display such as the AAT examples Doug talks about in his JoDI
paper. 

As you say, sometimes the order will be alphabetical and sometimes it
will not. I think this mixture is even more frequent with taxonomies
than with thesauri. 

1. If it's not alphabetical, but some logical sequence, the client will
want to respect the order in which the relations have been returned by
the server.

2. If it's alphabetical, then of course we can ask "Alphabetical
according to which language"? A series of relations sequenced by English
labels will clearly not work if you want to display the French labels.
That may not matter that much, if the client accepts the job of
re-sorting all the relations by label for every language for every set
of relations for every record that we want to display.  

But the harder question is, How does the client know when the sequence
is alphabetical (or is irrelevant) and when it's not (and is
significant)?  

Ron 

Ron Davies 

Information and documentation systems consultant 

Av. Baden-Powell 1  Bte 2, 1200 Brussels, Belgium        

Email:  ron@rondavies.be 

Tel:    +32 (0)2 770 33 51 

GSM:    +32 (0)484 502 393


At 19:15 9/05/2004, Stella Dextre Clarke wrote:


Ron,
Not sure I understand this question. Is it about the sequence among
sibling narrower terms? If so, then very often the sequence does not
matter and alphabetical order is the most convenient. But sometimes
there is a natural order, such as the order of size, or of age, or of
location. Presentation in the natural order helps people to understand
the underlying concepts better, detect omissions, overlaps etc. The
person who determines this is the thesaurus editor. The presentation
becomes even more helpful if node labels are inserted as in Leonard's
example. (In this example, notice that he found a natural order in some
of the groups but not others.)
 
I hope I've been answering the right question?
Stella
 
*****************************************************
Stella Dextre Clarke
Information Consultant
Luke House, West Hendred, Wantage, Oxon, OX12 8RR, UK
Tel: 01235-833-298
Fax: 01235-863-298
SDClarke@LukeHouse.demon.co.uk
*****************************************************



-----Original Message----- 

From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Ron Davies 

Sent: 09 May 2004 13:26 

To: public-esw-thes@w3.org 

Subject: RE: Supporting arrays of concepts : node labels



Let me apologize in advance for asking what might be a very naive
question at this stage, but there is a tremendous amount of material to
get through to try to get up to speed on current developments. Stella
brings up an issue that I was just trying to get a grip on, namely, the
sequence in the different concepts presented as of the same property. Is
there any implied sequence among, say, Narrower Terms for a given
concept? If so, what is it (or who determines it) and where is it
indicated?



Thanks very much.


Ron



Ron Davies 

Information and documentation systems consultant 

Av. Baden-Powell 1  Bte 2, 1200 Brussels, Belgium        

Email:  ron@rondavies.be 

Tel:    +32 (0)2 770 33 51 

GSM:    +32 (0)484 502 393



At 13:43 9/05/2004, Stella Dextre Clarke wrote: